"What dire offence from trivial causes springs," he silently quoted. His present plight was the result of putting Cornelia into a bad temper at the breakfast table that morning. Afterwards, he had gone to pacify her, a feat he had so often accomplished before. So often, in fact, that it seemed to him rather a joke to watch Cornelia's stony heart melt into abject sentimentality. A double-edged joke, now he came to think it over, in his present plight.
Well, on this occasion she had not been as wax in his hands. Nor had she been sentimental. True, she had apparently let herself be mollified as of old. But he was so absorbed in Janet that he failed to be struck by her unusual manner. In retrospect it stood out. Cornelia had become playful: it was the playfulness of the panther.
She had begged him to go to Fontainebleau, pointing out that everybody went at least once in a lifetime, and that he could oblige her by doing his duty to himself and performing a service for her at one and the same time. The service (it would save Harry a journey!) was to give a commission for a special Paulette design to an artist who had an open-air studio in the famous Fontainebleau forest.
On his way from Paulette's to the Gare de Lyon he had wondered whether Janet wouldn't be mightily piqued by his unannounced absence of two days. Two days cut clean out of a visit that was not scheduled to be a long one! Well, if she was piqued, so much the better.
Yes, but mightn't she suppose him deeply wounded by her wantonly taunting shot at his impecunious, ineligible pretentions? Possibly. But, as a matter of fact, he had been deeply wounded. A taunt from her lips, at such a moment, and in such a style! It was horribly unlike the Janet he had known in Kips Bay. Had she really become calculating to her finger tips in accordance with the law of the evolution of the Lorillardian female? Did her rapturous return of his kisses mean nothing to her?
Oh, well, after a tremendous love affair like hers with Claude, a young lady was probably as much thrilled by a kiss of rapture now and then, as by an extra slice of toast at breakfast.
So he had reasoned as he was about to jump on a bus running to the Lyon station. He had stopped and retraced his steps to the Maison Paulette, telling himself that as a sane and sensible citizen of the world it would be much better to bid her a brief good-bye.
Here in Fontainebleau his memory retraced these steps for the fiftieth time. Cornelia had been in the exhibition room, thank heaven. So he had hurried upstairs to the gymnasium, stopping to glance in at the private office on his way. That was how he had come to swing open the door and burst incontinently upon Janet and St. Hilaire.
Certainly, there was nothing like a smasher in the face for making you feel things you had been innocent of feeling before.
"Let the pain do the work!" said Robert, quoting to himself the oldest and most respected maxim known to the medical profession. Then he went to bed.